Links to Your Site

When looking for links to your site, from a purely PageRank point of view, one might think you should simply look for pages that have the highest Toolbar PageRank. (Whilst keeping in mind that every page of a site has its own PageRank, so you must consider the PageRank of the "links" page, or whatever page the actual link will exist on.) However, this way of thinking is incorrect. If you’ve not just jumped to this section then you’ll probably have worked out why that is.

The PageRank given by a link is far more complicated than this simplification. There may have been a time when that was an okay approximation…but no more. As more and more people try to get links from only
high PageRank sites, it becomes less and less of a winning proposition.

The actual PageRank from an individual page is shared out amongst the links on that page (remember the PageRank calculations?). So, links from pages that have the same PageRank aren't always created equal. It depends on how many other links your link is sharing the links page with. For instance, a link from a
page with a PageRank of 4 might be better than a link from a page with a PageRank of 6 if there are less total links on the PR 4 page. Right now there just isn’t enough information available to allow us to know to what extent this stretches. However, it’s significant enough to make it pointless to just choose high PageRanked sites as your main linking strategy. There's also another, more matter-of-fact reason why that type of linking strategy might not be the best; sites with high PageRanks are often fussy about which sites they will link out to,
making them harder to get linked from than lower PageRanked sites. However, sites struggling with their own PageRank numbers should be more receptive to exchanging reciprocal links with other like-minded sites.
Now let's factor in feedback. Let’s say, for example, that there are two separate pages on other people’s sites which both have a PageRank of 4. Both of these have ten links to other pages. But the page on your site that you want them to link to, already has a link to the page on the second site. By getting a link from
the second site you’re generating feedback and getting more PageRank than if you had gotten a link from the first site! That’s an over simplification; in fact, feedback loops can get even more complicated. Remember, the number of links on the page linking to you will alter the amount of feedback, etc.

Can you work it all out for a given page’s situation? No – neither can I. My advice, therefore, is this – get links from sites that seem appropriate and have good quality, regardless of their current PageRank. If they are relevant to your site, and are high quality sites, they will either help your PageRank now, or will
do so in the future.

To really get your PageRank humming, get yourself a listing 24 in DMOZ and Yahoo and enjoy the artificially enhanced PageRank that they  provide.